Before porn could admit it was porn: 1969’s astonishing A Man’s Pictorial Guide to Feminine Hygiene (NSFW, duh)

November 4, 2010

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

A Man’s Pictorial Guide to Feminine Hygiene

Author: None listed

Date: 1969

Publisher: Pendulum Pictorials, Los Angeles

Discovered at: Midwestern estate sale

The Cover Promises: “Some men go through their entire life without ever seeing a woman douche.”

Representative Quotes:

“In subsequent intercourse, the penis of her partners rammed the long-forgotten tampon into the vaginal wall so often an irritation developed.” (page 82).

Maria G.:’I douche after every guy, use all the nice smelling stuff and go back out with a complete clothing change. I know there are some gals who don’t even change their panties after a screwin’, but they’re dying out, thank goodness.’ (page 40)

In 1969, America was fast on its journey from the nothing’s dirty days of mid-century to the proud pornopolis of today, a nation so glutted on hawt cams and taintsquatting that any year now we’ll vote in a government promising coast-to-coast hourly hose-downs.

But in ’69 things were different. Hardcore porn was still mostly underground and imported – even with Deep Throat just three years away. Playboy still wasn’t showing pubic hair, and despite the liberal trend of recent supreme court decisions, publishers and filmmakers enjoyed no guarantee that sexually explicit work would not be banned. In ’66, the Supreme Court had ruled that “a book cannot be proscribed [as obscene] unless it is to be found utterly without redeeming social value.”

That meant early pornographers had to gin up a modicum of social value.

So, they ran with hilarious crap like A Man’s Pictorial Guide to Feminine Hygiene, which is to medical books what The Devil in Miss Jones is to theology. This charade emboldened Pendulum Publishing to go further than Playboy would dare.

Here’s a typical page:

Yes, your Crap Archivist is censoring these images, not out of his own prudishness but because his mama reads these columns. (And, admittedly, my love of Colorforms, which has previously been documented here and here.)

The book includes almost 90 photos, many of them close-ups detailing the application and insertion of cremes, tampons, douches, and vibrators. (All of these activities inspire the models to feign ecstasy.)

Here’s the authors’ most thorough justification of what seems to be obvious obscenity:

They keep the ruse going with reams of text: tossed-off medical facts, “case histories” purportedly taken from real women. The results are confounding, riddled with type-os, and clearly not intended to be read. It’s like some faintly scientific ipsum lorem:

“Does the man who thrusts his penis into a soft pillow and the woman who inserts a vibrator into her vagina care whether his (‘his’ in this sanse [sic] referring to both sexes] educational background had anything to do with the fact that he enjoys doing what he is doing?”

Many of the testimonials seem entirely made up:

Countess D. La S. Y.:

“In the old country (the contessa is from a Balkan country) our grand-mama used urine from a pregnant mare as a douche.”

Miss Ruth A.:

“Use a rubber? You’re out of your cotton-pickin’ mind. When I get a penis inside my body, I want it just the way it’s supposed to be, big, wet and naked.”

The photo session were not held in glamorous surroundings.

Is that a Barbara Streisand LP? Lord, on a clear day you can see everything.

Another unlikely testimonial:

J.G. McI, Madam

“This whorin’ business sure has changed. I can remember when we first started, if a girl had her period, it put her out for at least a week, now two days off is plenty. I think we had about one knock-up a year. I always paid to abort ’em, and after a coupe weeks resting, I always sent the gals on their way. They weren’t much for whorin’ after that.”

A chapter on masturbation includes first-person accounts of a 10 year-old who grinds on her dolly and a 14 year-old with the knob from a drawer.

Other self-reported self-stimulators:

A St. Peter carved from Neoprene

a pop bottle

“condoms filled with a wide variety of substances”

“an endless list of penis alternatives”

Some helpful instructions for the insertion of tampons:

“There are three acceptable positions for the woman. She should either place one foot on a chair or a commode seat, sit on the seat with her knees apart, or stand squatting slightly with the legs apart. Whichever position is most comfortable should be used.”

Because men absolutely must know how to do this, photos document these positions. The faces of the women might surprise you: who knew that hygiene felt so very, very good?

And the book goes on and on like this, giving its audience what it wants but also insisting on some lie of a message at every turn. In this it is exactly like the old GI Joe and He-Man cartoons.

Here’s one to grow on.

Shocking Detail:

“There are many words published as to why one person does it one way, another a different way, but very few printed words can be found that adequately describe the intense satisfaction and overwhelming contentment that follows a self-controlled ejaculation.”

“Overwhelming contentment”? You mean everybody ever has been doing it wrong?

Highlight:
Toward the end, a series of photos demonstrates the various methods of birth control. At least one of these necessitates a partner:

Also:

No matter how many times I tried, some Colorforms just didn’t lend themselves to this project: